


Lizzie Borden Took an Axe

by fourteenlines



Category: Farscape
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2002-01-14
Updated: 2002-01-14
Packaged: 2017-10-04 12:40:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,186
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30170
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fourteenlines/pseuds/fourteenlines
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Anger is a stop along the way.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lizzie Borden Took an Axe

**Author's Note:**

> Huge thanks go to Natalie, for moral support, and Sarah, for ensuring that I make sense. Spoilers for Fractures, Relativity, The Choice.

_Lizzie Borden took an axe  
and gave her mother forty whacks.  
And when she saw what she had done,  
she gave her father forty-one._

+++

The pain, it's the only thing that's familiar. Pain is good - she can deal with it. Her bloody knuckles, the sharp jar in her forearm every time she hits the punching bag, the protesting ache of her calf muscles when she lashes out with another kick. The screaming in her lungs from arns of this. Glorious, suffocating, encompassing pain.

If she doesn't hurt herself, she would end up hurting everyone else. And she knows enough about this "loss" business to realize it isn't a good idea.

She's losing her mind, that's the only valid explanation. Sometimes, she repeats this, chant-like, in time with her swinging fists. The indomitable control only lasts for so long, around the others, and then she lashes out in vicious fits of rage. She has no idea where the impulses to do permanent damage come from, but somewhere inside, in a little locked-away corner of her psyche, the impulses appall her. Sometimes, it would feel so good to take that big, wicked knife of hers and shove it into the flesh of her thigh. But that buried corner of her mind is powerful, and it manages to deflect. Guides her here, to the punching bag, to the workout mat, to the encapsulated world of raw knuckles and raw breath.

She is what she was bred to be, for now, and that breeding did not prepare her for the rage that followed grief. Peacekeepers cannot afford real anger. Look what happened to Crais.

And so this, the ugly grace of lunge-and-thrust, of spin-and-kick, is a place of retreat. Blessed, blessed violence.

It tends to be worse when he's around. Crichton, or John, or whatever she feels it's appropriate to call him that day. When they're discussing tactics, his mind working in seven thousand different directions while his body stands too close to hers, and she feels a flush creep over her skin just from watching him. He doesn't do it purposefully. But that poisonous rage wells up from inside when she catches the blush spreading to her face, and then it's either bloody his mouth, or find something else to hit as soon as she can.

How dare he live, while the other one should die?

Xhalax was a lying bitch, and she should have shot her when she had the chance. Yes. That would have been better. Frelling Crais and his frelling sense of self-preservation. What good is self-preservation, she wonders. What good is anything these days?

The centrifugal force that pulls at her when she spins, the recoil when her fist connects with the bag, the ache in her joints when she shakes out her hand - these things are useful. The rest is either war, or it's dren.

The fresh rage, the rage at her mother, distracts her. This is a new emotion, heavy and hard. Her next spin goes off course, and she trips,sending her sidelong into the punching bag, where her jaw connects with a sharp crack.

She lays on the ground, groaning, and reveling in this new kind of pain.

Then a voice makes all the euphoria disappear.

"Aeryn?"

And suddenly, she's just a pathetic shell of a woman, lying on the floor, with an aching head, an aching back, aching hands. Aching heart. It's just another twist of fate. And yes, she hates him for it some. But mostly she hates her mother, because Xhalax promised that the dead don't leave you in pieces. But that's all she feels like now, a woman, left in pieces.

On the floor.

With Crichton standing over her, wearing that concern on his face like a badge of honor. Frell him. Frell them all, but especially Xhalax.

"Aeryn, did you hurt yourself?"

What does it look like, nurfer?

"No, not in the least," she says calmly. She will not cry, not in front of him. She tries to push herself smoothly off the ground, but her body won't comply. She's not injured that badly; it must be something to do with him.

"Aeryn, you _are_ hurt. Let me help you." He drops to his knees, his hands descend, so soft, loving, worried. She struggles to sit up, and his hands on her body don't help at all. It's easy to bat his hand away; her strength has not left her completely. Must have been shock, she decides.

Gaining her feet again is a bit more of a struggle, and where he tries to help her it only serves to drag her down. He doesn't speak, and she wants it to surprise her, but the look in his eyes makes it normal, expected. He does what he's always done, and she wants to change that.

He is caught completely off guard by her wild swing in his direction. Her fist meets his chest, and leaves a smear of her blood on his t-shirt. She can hear him swear, "What the--" just before she sweeps his legs out from under him.

He lands hard, but quickly gets to his feet. He's still concerned, caring, oh yes, but there's something else there as well. Something dark, and she likes it.

"Aeryn--"

She doesn't give him enough time to speak before she lands a kick to his stomach, and he doubles over. As soon as she makes a blow, she stands back, waits for his reaction. He'll get as angry as she is sooner or later, and then they can begin to rebuild some kind of connection.

This time, when he straightens, there's something in his stance that tells her he's ready. The words he says are almost extraneous. "You wanna kick my ass, fine. Bring it on."

Normally he'd be no challenge in a fight. But she was weakened by her earlier fall, and it's soon apparent that they're evenly matched. He fights differently than she does, but his brute force counteracts her smoothness and stealth, and vice versa.

It irritates her that he's obviously not trying to hurt her. He only lands a few blows, in unimportant places. A voice in her head is glad he's better at deflecting her own blows, but she is mostly just angry.

Finally she sweeps his legs from beneath him again, but now wastes no time in falling to the ground and pinning him. He struggles halfheartedly, but is really using the time to study her face. Unexpectedly, the direction this is headed is so laughably apparent she wants to be sick. What, trying to taint this one? Break him, change him, defile him so she couldn't have what she used to even if she decided she wanted him? Her grip on his arms must be painful, and he in turn is holding her arms roughly.

She shifts on top of him, and his eyes almost roll back in his head. She smiles; a wicked, curving grin. He's not above this after all.

Her guard is down, and suddenly he pulls her flat against him and rolls them so she is pinned beneath him. He holds her hands now, squeezing them so tight she gasps in pain as more blood oozes from her lacerated knuckles. "What's going on, Aeryn?" he rasps.

She has no answer for him, but feints outrage at the pain so he'll release her hands. And when he does, she takes his head in her hands and pulls him to her, opening her mouth to his and forcing him into a violent kiss.

He must truly be angry, or frustrated, or one of those blacker emotions, because he gives as good as she does. He bites her tongue, and she bites his lower lip. His hands are in her hair, around the braid where he can force his fingers in, and his grip is so tight she thinks he may be pulling it out.

She knows what this is. He thinks she'll stop, pull away, shout about his hormones or something and storm away. He thinks he's safe to go as far as she will, because it will never be too far. But not this time. This time, she admits, she wants it cheap and ugly. For her own sake, and nothing for his.

But frell him, even in this state he can read her like that journal, not just as a book in his language, but as one he wrote himself. He pulls away violently, probably leaving some of his skin in her mouth, scrambling across the floor to a safe distance.

She breathes deeply, but it does nothing to calm her hammering heart. It's not love, not lust. It's just rage. At him, at the other one, at Crais, at Xhalax. He wears two faces, and so he bears the brunt.

Her breathing is calmer, and she can see him relax while he watches her, probably thinking the worst is over. And that's when she strikes.

She streaks across the mat, pinning him down again, throwing her legs on either side of his body so she's straddling him. The heel of one hand goes to his throat, and the other is in his stomach. She watches as his face turns red, and she rocks against the hard planes of his body. His mouth is making words with no sound, and his hands slap the mat - what that signifies she doesn't know.

Several microts pass, and her hand slips against his sweat-covered skin. He can barely force out the words: "Breathe, Aeryn."

She gasps, realizing she'd been holding her breath as well, and releases him suddenly, moving a few metras away.

He lays there on the ground a microt, a wheezing sound escaping his lungs, and for a moment his resemblance to the other one, when he was dying, is terrible and frightening.

As soon as he can, he scrambles to his feet, backing away from her. Fingers rubbing his throat, he coughs and regards her with fury. "What the hell is _wrong_ with you? The other guy dies, so I have to die, too?"

She sits diffidently on the ground, but her throat threatens to close. The craziest, frelled-up part of this is that he actually _understands_. "It's not just you."

"What do you mean?"

"It's not just you. It's mostly Xhalax."

"Xhalax. Your _mom_?"

"Yes. You see, she lied to me." She stands then, the thought renewing her wrath. Her voice sounds sharp even to her own ears. "She told me that the dead leave you all at once, and there's nothing you can do. But you're there, you're _right frelling there_, all the time, and the stupid thing, the worst thing, is that I could do something about it."

"Your chances are getting slimmer, sweetheart." But she knows he doesn't really mean it, and she can see in his eyes that he knows it too.

She laughs. "Do you know, I'm forgetting the way you taste? I'm forgetting the way you smell after sex. What your breath feels like on my neck in the morning. And so you see, Xhalax is a bigger liar than ever! It's ironic, you know? She wanted me to suffer, and now all I want is for her to suffer."

"Nice to see you have some family feeling left."

"You know, I was going to kill her. I had a chance, and you wouldn't let me do it."

"_I_ wouldn't? You mean the other guy. The other me."

"You wouldn't have let me do it, either."

"Oh, so now we're finally acknowledging that fact?" His face is twisted with black emotions. Yes, she thinks. He knows. He knows the anger. It's funny, in a sick way.

She walks toward him, casually, and he is unprepared for the right hook that connects with his jaw. "You should have let me kill her."

He doesn't hesitate this time, stands nose-to-nose with her so she can't get enough leverage to hit him again. She could still gun for his genitals, she supposes, but a part of her thinks they might be useful to her someday. His voice is a hiss in her ear. "If you're done giving your mother forty whacks, do you think we could bring this little temper tantrum to an end?"

The words have less meaning than usual, but his nonsense doesn't bother her anymore. She became accustomed to it on Talyn, and now it's just white noise.

"You shouldn't have died on me, either," she breathes, and then grabs his face, crushing his mouth with hers again. The kiss is more teeth than tongues; it rips chapped skin from her lips. 'I'm very angry,' she had said, and she had no idea at the time how true it was. This time she is the one to pull away. He looks at her, the vaguest of questions on his face.

She knows he hates this. She hates it too. But the pain, oh, the pain feels so, so right. She turns her head, and when she spits blood, she can no longer tell if it's John's or her own.

\--

end


End file.
